How to Remove Syndicated Search Partners from Microsoft Ad Campaigns

This post will take you through the methods, and steps to remove Syndicated Search Partners from Microsoft Ad Campaigns.

Microsoft ads is a great platform and I’ve spent millions of dollars on it, but unfortunately, I’ve also wasted thousands on spam traffic from their Syndicated Search Partners network since the level of spam protection is shockingly, and frankly suspiciously poor. Looking through reports you’ll find clear bot behavior such as click-through rates, on terms with many impressions, that are greater than 100%, or conversion rates that are many times your account average on sites that seem irrelevant.

While these issues shouldn’t exist in my opinion… thankfully, there are two ways to exclude Syndicated Search Partners and I’ll explain both below. The methods are:

1. Excluding individual Syndicated Search Partner Websites
2. Excluding all Syndicated Search Partners at an Ad Group Level

What are Syndicated Search Partners?

These are 3rd party websites that use Microsoft/Bing/AOL search engines, or their ad platforms, within their own search functionality. Some of these websites are extremely legitimate such as duckduckgo.com, but unfortunately, the majority of them are not as legitimate and full of spammy activity to inflate their own revenues (in my opinion/experience).

Why is There So Much Spam from Syndicated Search Partners?

That’s a good question… Essentially there are two issues at play. The first is that on these third party websites, the Microsoft network has less control and insight into the traffic so it’s easier for bot traffic to slip through than on the Microsoft Network itself.

The second issue is that you need to understand that these Search ‘Partners’ generate revenue by having impressions and clicks on the ads served by Microsoft. Because of that, they are incentivized to inflate those numbers. This is conjecture on my part, but from what I’ve seen my guess is they are creating bots that generate fake searches and clicks on the ads and this is driving revenue for them.

Now you might be thinking, there are bots crawling all over the web so maybe it’s not those sites themselves that created them. Well, there are reasons I disagree with this and the main one is the effort they’ve gone to to make the interactions appear natural to Microsoft. If it were a web crawler then it would ‘click’ the link, but it wouldn’t fill out lead forms on the websites to generate ‘conversions’ in the eyes of Microsoft. These Conversions not only make the clicks seem natural, it also tells the Microsoft algorithms that traffic to those sites is working for the advertisers and incentivize them to push even more traffic towards these spammy wastes of life.

If you’re an online marketer you may then be saying well there are lots of bots filling out forms in order to try and generate comment backlinks. This is true, but it’s the way that the forms are filled out in that they don’t include any backlink and use email addresses scraped from around the web versus an address specific to a website or link-builder.

Because of all of this, I’m quite confident that the traffic is intentionally malicious to waste your spend.

I’ll stop ranting… here’s how to solve these issues we shouldn’t be facing in the first place:

Excluding individual Syndicated Search Partner Websites

If you find that it’s just a few culprits wasting your ad spend, then you may want to go this route. As I mentioned, there are some very legitimate sites like duckduckgo.com and you may want to exclude the bad without ruining that good source. For most advertisers I’d recommend excluding all Search Partners, but if you’re doing enough volume to regularly review reports of placements then this might be for you.

You can exclude them on both a Campaign or an Account level. The first steps are the same:

1. Click on Campaigns on the left
2. Click on a Campaign you’d like to exclude them from (or any campaign if you want to exclude account-wide)
3. Click on Settings on the left and scroll down to the Exclusions section where you’ll see a large text field to enter URLs (from the syndicated search partners).
4. This will work on that specific campaign however if you’d like to exclude the sites account-wide then you’ll also find a link above that text box that takes you to the account-level option. This link is surprisingly not easily accessible and I’m unsure if it exists elsewhere so if you’d like a shortcut you can also use: https://ui.ads.microsoft.com/campaign/vnext/siteexclusionlists/viewlists
5. Once you add in the URLs and click save, they should be excluded.

Excluding all Syndicated Search Partners at an Ad Group Level

This method excludes the entire Syndicated Search Partner network so you don’t need to worry about individual exclusions. It’s my preferred method in most instances.

One thing I find interesting is how difficult Microsoft has made this process. Instead of having an account-wide option to remove syndicated Search Partners, they require you to select you want everything but them at an ad group level. Silly Microsoft…

To accomplish this:

1. If you want to exclude them from a specific campaign, click campaigns on the left and click the campaign to get to the ad groups page, otherwise if you want it on all ad groups, just click ad groups on the left.
2. Click the little checkbox at the top left to select all ad groups
3. At the top click Edit, then “Other Changes” (intuitive, right?)
4. Ensure the Select a Setting is on “Select your ad distribution”, then under networks select “Microsoft sites and select traffic”. This gives you everything aside from the Syndicated Search Partners.
5. Click Apply and you’re all set

One thing I’ll note with this method, is that quite often people have Google Ad campaigns auto importing and Bing will automatically reset this setting on each import, so check what distribution settings you’re importing and deselect updating them.

Conclusion

This is an issue, which shouldn’t be an issue to begin with, and that shouldn’t be as difficult to solve as it is. I hope Microsoft realizes this and continues to put their advertisers’ best interests first since this is a great platform and I’ve really liked working with it aside from this disappointing situation.

Hope this helped. If it did please feel free to let me know before, or if something is missing or incorrect I’d love to hear that too so that this information can be updated.